Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

The floor is yours We find out how a new classroom intervention is looking to give girls a louder, more confident voice during classroom debates – and why boys can benefit from what it has to offer, too... Bryony Hoskins is a professor of comparative social science at the University of Roehampton and a global authority on citizenship education, and the effects of inequality on political engagement. She also led the research underpinning the Gender Empowerment through Politics in Classrooms (G-EPIC) project – a new intervention aimed at challenging gender inequalities in politics and citizenship education. How did the G-EPIC project originally come about? My previous research had shown that there’s a large gender gap when it comes to having the confidence to talk about politics. Even when controlling for political knowledge, confidence levels among girls in this area tend to be much lower. Conversely, boys tend to score higher in confidence when engaging with political discussions, despite their actual level of political knowledge being, on average, generally lower. While difficult to prove statistically, this could be among the reasons as to why we have fewer female political leaders. At the very least, it seems to be a contributing factor as to why women and young women don’t engage with formal politics to the same degree – because they often lack comparable levels of confidence in their own knowledge about the topic, or how they believe they’ll perform in public. There was something happening inside classrooms that was contributing to this lowering of confidence among girls. We felt it important to examine why this was happening, and develop an intervention that could address it. What formhas the project taken and what resources have come out of it? The G-EPIC project consists of several different components, one of which involved classrooms observations to try and identify what was going on and why. We got to see, first-hand, how boys dominate classroom discussions that address political areas. Girls do continue to be more successful at listening and taking notes during classroom discussions, but what they’re not doing is taking the floor and building the kind of skills needed for effective political engagement. There’s a big performance element to political debate, partly driven by the need to capture the space. That’s why the intervention we’ve developed is aimed at helping teachers create safe spaces, and employs inclusive methods to build girls’ confidence, so that they can potentially learn how to become the political leaders of the future – whether that’s within their local communities, or at a national level. It’s interesting that you identified a distinct, yet under-discussed field of knowledge in which girls are falling behind boys, as that goes against the narrative that girls are consistently achieving better academic outcomes than boys... The confidence we saw could be a reason for why men progress faster than women once they’re beyond school, in employment and so forth – because in the classroom, they’ve been able to develop a series of important soft skills that existing exams don’t really take account of. How did the research you gathered translate into the final intervention? The intervention was co- constructed with teachers, students’ and civil society organisations. We began with six teachers in November 2023 at Roehampton University, where we developed an initial five-lesson programme. We then gathered some feedback from students, who told us what was boring and should be removed, and what they wanted more of. One thing they asked to see were conversations withMPs on why they first got involved in politics, so we recorded some interviews with sittingMPs and added those. What would delivering the intervention look like in practice? The main G-EPIC programme consists of five distinct lessons, structured as follows: • Lesson 1 –What is politics? The main feature of lesson 1 is the ‘Diamond 9’ activity, where students are given a set of images that can include everything from sanitary products, to photos of border crossings, school classrooms and high profile political figures. The students are then tasked with putting those pictures into a ‘diamond 9’ indicating which of the areas and issues they illustrate are more or less political. • Lesson 2 –How do I fit into politics? This lesson includes a quiz that gauges students’ own political opinions, with no right or wrong answers. After finding out whether their responses suggest they leanmore towards the left, right or centre, the students will learnmore about the political spectrum. • Lesson 3 –How do I create change? Here, we’ll explore counter-narratives in the form of case studies – such as the example of Gina Martin, the young woman who successfully campaigned for upskirting to be made a criminal offence. Her story is an inspirational one that shows how one ordinary young woman was able to bring about significant political change. This lesson also touches on the topic of period poverty, by examining the campaign to permanently retain a COVID-era government offer of “We got to see,first-hand,how boys dominate classroom discussions that address political areas” 24 teachwire.net/secondary